The First Crypto Super App

Hyperliquid has quietly become the most interesting asset in crypto right now. The token hit an all-time high of $64.32 two days before this recording, up 156% on the year, and it just surpassed Solana in fully-diluted market cap. But the numbers that really matter: Hyperliquid processes roughly $170 billion in monthly perpetual futures volume, controls about 70% of the on-chain perpetual market share, and printed a record $2.95 billion in open interest on May 25th. The panel — Michael, Matt, and David — spends most of this episode unpacking why this is happening and whether it can continue.

The Four Revenue Engines

Hyperliquid is no longer just a perp exchange, and that framing is "two cycles out of date," as Michael puts it. It has become a unified derivatives venue with four interlocking revenue streams. The first is the perpetual futures business itself, which generates roughly $56 million in monthly trading fees. The second is HIP3, a builder-deployed markets program where anyone staking 500,000 HYPE (roughly $25 million) can deploy their own perpetual contracts. Token XYZ has taken particular advantage of this, doing about $12 billion in volume across tokenized stocks, commodities, forex, and pre-IPO contracts to date.